


The Couch by the Fifth Sconce to the Left of the Entrance

by cyoctrix



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Fluff, Light Angst, M/M, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 21:45:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20378608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyoctrix/pseuds/cyoctrix
Summary: It's Tom's... until it's not.





	The Couch by the Fifth Sconce to the Left of the Entrance

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wynnebat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [wynnebat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat) in the [TomarryFlashExchanges](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TomarryFlashExchanges) collection. 

> **Prompt:**
> 
> Harry/Tom, cuddling in the common room

Their friendship started pretty innocuously, which is the last thing anyone would have expected had they tried to guess how two such polarizing personalities would interact when shoved into the same space - or, rather, the same couch.

Tom Riddle was a year ahead of Harry Potter in Slytherin, which really should have meant something if things down here were at all typical. Quality of life in the dungeons wasn't based on age or seniority as much as who you were, what you were, what you could do, and who you could do. 

This meant that despite his magical prowess and classically good looks, Tom, by standards of unspoken propriety, now had to share his preferred couch in the commons with this upstart Potter who smiled too much and wouldn't know the use of a hairbrush if it were placed directly in front of him.

It wasn't as though Potter just threw himself into the cushion beside him one day, though, oh no.

"This looks like a pretty good spot." Harry had been followed by not one but two friends, both of whom had immediately shied away from the prospect of Tom's company. Not Harry, though. "Well, I'd like to actually sit down, so you can both find somewhere else if you like."

Most of the interactions Tom had thus far had with Slytherin house were unpleasant, his blood status public and a subject of easy ridicule. He didn't sit back and take it, instead lashing out and ensuring those few wouldn't have anything more to say about his existence… but this sort of thing leaves a lasting mark. The couch by the fifth sconce to the left of the exit was firmly his and his alone.

Until now.

"Do you mind if I sit here?" Some of the vexation of his friends' abandonment was present in Harry's voice, but his resilience was made immediately plain by the smile that was already starting to reform on his face. Too expressive. How had Slytherin not already eaten him alive?

"Be my guest," Tom had murmured after a moment of perplexed silence, pointedly looking back down to his own book. Refusing when the other hadn't been expressly impolite would be gauche, even for him. He didn't have great manners, but he wasn't completely adverse to friendly company.

"Great, thanks. Oh, er, Harry Potter." A calloused hand had inserted itself between Tom's face and the book in his lap and Tom's shoulders had visibly tensed as a result. He could have broken those fingers, or perhaps gone further up and twisted the bone clean at the elbow, for such presumption. This Harry Potter probably wouldn't be so quick to smile again after that.

"Pleasure," Tom replied instead, eyes flicking up very briefly as the hand was pumped once and released in short order. "Now, I'm reading, so you can be quiet and do the same or find somewhere else to sit."

Harry didn't sit down immediately at this, wavering on the balls of his feet as though he could feel Tom's threatening thoughts tangible in the air. When he sat down anyway, it should have been less of a surprise than it was.

Tom didn't actually get much reading done, that first evening. Harry was perfectly well-behaved, both feet firmly on the floor and page turning minimal. His being a slow reader was disdainful, but better for how much noise wasn't produced from his side of the couch. This could be fine. Tom was hyper-aware of every minute shift of the other boy's leg, of his repressed energy, but it wasn't anything he couldn't tune out after the first half-hour or so.

When Harry joined Tom again the next afternoon, though, Tom lifted his head slowly from the pages of his own text and pinned the other boy with an unblinking stare that would have wilted most flowers.

"There are plenty of other places to sit." Tom thought he'd managed to sound reasonable - friendly, even. "Your friends are elsewhere. Why are you not elsewhere?"

Harry's effervescent smile didn't dim a single watt; his chipper mood was almost disrespectful for how hard Tom was trying to subliminally scare him off.

"I want to sit here. I got a lot done yesterday." 

He didn't - not by Tom's standards, anyway - but Tom didn't say so. He let the lift of his brow speak for him. 

"I wasn't too awful, was I?" Harry doggedly continued, disregarding that eyebrow lift with a stubborn twist at the corner of his persistent smile. "Look. I won't even talk to you if you don't want, no-name Slytherin bloke who sits in the corner on his own with his nice hair and fifty-two books."

The only response Tom had for this description was a slow flush that he didn't let higher than his neck, which had ducked down into his shoulders as though to scratch an itch. He didn't know whether to be affronted or flattered or something else entirely, so he decided to be neither and simply blank himself of all of it.

"My name is Tom Riddle. Sit down, then, if you must... and be quiet." Harry was quick to obey, probably cowed a bit by the monotony of Tom's seeming disregard coming out of nowhere.

It went on like this for a week or two - Harry joining him, saying a few words of lighthearted greeting, and then going quiet so they could both study. After a while, the novelty of their silent acquaintance ceased being such and the hawkish gaze of the other Slytherins slowly started to slide over their corner once more, granting them the privacy of the unimportant.

Harry, seeming to sense this shift, started to become more comfortable invading Tom's space. It started with sock-feet tucked under his person when he sat down, then a cross-legged lean against the far armrest, and then a cup of perpetually lukewarm tea balanced on his knee. 

("Want some? No? Well, just let me know if you change your mind.")

Harry was so loose with his expressions, so earnest. When he read a passage in his text that he didn't quite grasp, frustration could be found in at least three different parts of his face and about five different places on his body. He was a walking tell, a silent movie on the cushion that he'd inhabited long enough now to deem his.

As the weeks churned on, Tom's silent appraisal finally found itself voiced, starting with barbed advice.

"If you turned your wrist correctly at the hook, you might actually get the cast," Tom had said one day, his syllables even and consonants crisp as though he'd been silently rehearsing the words the whole time he'd watched Harry flub the transfiguration of his empty teacup. 

Harry blinked up in shock, delight quickly replacing discontent. 

"You really do care," he'd crowed in an undertone, those startling green eyes crinkling with a joy he didn't even bother to hide. Foolish boy. "Show me?"

Tom did. He wouldn't give his yearmates the time of day, but this impertinent, energetic mess of a Potter had gotten under his skin enough that he had vested interest in his welfare. At this point, if anyone were to see Harry flub simple spells like a teacup transfiguration, it would reflect badly on him. They sat together often enough that most people already believed they were fast friends or at least in studying cahoots.

After that, they mostly did away with the silence. Some days were worse than others for easy conversation, what with Tom's penchant for continued retribution on those Slytherins who didn't have manners enough to leave well enough alone and Harry's tumultuous friendships and grueling Quidditch practices. 

Neither explicitly voiced it, but each considered the other a sea of peace, a happy constant, a reliable routine. They argued, of course, but only about inconsequential things. The couch was too mild a place for anything else.

When Harry returned later than usual one night to the common room red-faced and breathing shallowly, Tom didn't immediately register it as odd. Most students were already abed and the fires were perilously low, hinting at the late hour, but sometimes practices went on for longer than might be recommended.

Harry was normally polite enough to shower and change before joining Tom, but rather than doing so that night, he'd made a beeline for the couch and collapsed on his cushion with a low, unhappy sound half-buried into the armrest.

Tom pressed a slip of parchment into the book in his lap and set it gingerly aside, his eyes panning over the scrunched-up form of his study partner.

"You're upset," said a fixedly clinical Tom, one hand reaching out to hover over the forearm hiding the other's face. When there wasn't an immediate response, Tom let his fingertips press into Harry's arm, grip almost bruising in its intensity. "Look at me when I speak to you, please."

The pain was alarming enough that Harry did as he was bid, indignant disbelief in his face as he tried to wrench his arm away.

"What's your problem? That-- augh." Harry batted at Tom's hand, his anxiety boiling over through that point of contact. His voice was raspy with unshed tears, and only now does Tom get to see the telltale blotchy face of one in the midst of an emotional crisis. "That _hurts_. Do you have any idea how to talk to people, or are you just winging it most days?"

"Most don't come to me for comfort," Tom replied after a pause in his usual bland manner, drawing his hand back with a moue of discontent at Harry's recalcitrance. "And when they do, they usually tell me their problems before whinging into the couch cushions." Tom is a liar. No one came to him for comfort because they knew better; Harry was just his own breed. 

Harry was also accustomed enough to Tom's peculiarities that rather than getting further riled at the older boy's callous words, he hiccoughed a self-deprecating laugh that could just have easily been a sob.

"You're the worst, Tom." To Tom's utter bewilderment, Harry then proceeded to reach out to the hand that had pierced his arm almost hard enough to break skin, using it to pull the gangly form of his friend closer. "Don't say anything. Just… don't." 

Tom didn't. When Harry wrapped his arms about Tom's midsection in a crushing hug, he kept his mouth firmly shut. He didn't comment on the fact that Harry's face was wet and sullying his button-up. He didn't inform Harry of the late hour, or of his own curiosity on whatever had made the younger so upset in the first place.

One arm was pinned to Tom's side, so he didn't much have to worry about what to do with that one, but his free limb didn't know exactly where to go. It started by resting on his own knee, but that struck Tom as somewhat wrong. He let it migrate to Harry's shoulder, but that wasn't quite it either - despite the way Harry's breath stuttered into his shirt as a result.

Tom finally settled a light hand on the nape of Harry's neck, fingers curling into the fine hairs there. At this, Harry let his held breath out in a shaky gust, the strain in his posture easing into the physical likeness of their afternoon conversations. Light banter interspersed with cutting remarks suffused their friendship, for the most part, curated by neither yet cultivated by both.

This was new in one way, but in another it wasn't. They saw each other every day as they were - this acknowledgement went deeper than skin, deeper than the nails digging possessively into scalp, especially to two boys caught in those years where they were growing into their selves and their environment.

"Thank you," murmured Harry, exhaustion and their position making the words almost incomprehensible. Tom may not even have understood them if he hadn't been feeling the same grateful care unfurling in his core like a flower opening itself to the sun.

Rather than responding aloud in kind, Tom tightened his own hold on the back of Harry's head, letting his body curl properly into the embrace. He'd let himself examine his reactions and what they might mean later. He'd think about the cause of Harry's upset and who to curse for it later. For now, this was very nice.


End file.
